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Together. Out loud. No angle.

17

AGGIE

A couple weeks after the worst day of my life, here’s what losing everything else looks like. I answer phones at a dental office in a strip mall, I live in a studio sublet with a hot plate and a mattress on the floor, and the biggest decision I make most nights is which cereal to have for dinner.

The apartment went first. Couldn't be helped. I lost the front-desk job and I lost Diablo inside the same forty-eight hours. That’s a hell of a way to zero out both your incomes at once. The old place needed the whole paycheck I was getting from Ardent as it was, so I did what I had to do. I packed my entire life up, gave notice, said goodbye to my landlord’s chihuahua Diablo, and moved into a four-hundred-square-foot place with a hot plate for a kitchen and cracks in the ceiling.

It should feel like this is the most pathetic thing going on in my life right now, and some days it does. But I’m also good with all this. I’m really being me. No cover to keep up. No cardigan hung by the door for a job I was pretending to love. No scarf-covered lamp angled just so for a woman named Diablo who doesn't exist. Just a mattress, a milk crate, and me, the real me, whoever that's turning out to be. Turns out, you can fit a whole stripped-down life into eleven boxes and a ratty tote bag to move across town. Most of what wouldn't fit, I didn’t need anyway.

I'm one payment from clear with Sal, and scraping to get there. Birdie and I aren't speaking. The men are a memory I don’t think about. But I'm upright. I sleep, I eat, and I do not cry in the dental office bathroom more than twice a week, which for me right now counts as winning.

Another win? The dentist I’m working for says he can do my teeth whitening for a whopping 10% off. Gee thanks, buddy.

But sometimes, the bullshit, the reveal, decides to replay in my head. I see the conference room. The hallway. I've watched the damn thing a hundred times, and every time, I see myself the same way, as the mark, the dupe, the idiot receptionist who thought she was so clever, who was played for a fool by three rich men who knew who she was the entire time.

It's a good story. It lets me hate them outright. Nothing ambiguous about it.

The problem is that some nights the bullshit rewrites itself.

Instead of the conference room, I’m in my old bedroom in front of my webcam. I’ve got the dark, my lamp, my nine-dollar slip, my red lipstick, and three men on the other side of a screen who stopped breathing every time I moved. Instead of Beck's flat look in that hallway, I get Beck's voice at midnight, tough and scratchy, saying my fake name like I was the last woman on earth. I get Elias, silent, paying and paying just to watch. I get Theo, low in my ear, telling me to take care of myself, telling me I am⁠—

That's when my hand drifts south under my blanket, and I go still, because a decent, self-respecting, freshly humiliated woman does not get wet thinking about the assholes who lied to her.

Except this is the thing I'm figuring out about myself. Me and my red lippy have nobody left to perform for. I have never been decent or self-respecting when it mattered, and I am so over that shit.

So I don't stop.

I let the memory run, the good one, the one where I owned all three of them at once, and I slide my hand to the place they paid a lot of money to see and dream about, and I let myself want it. Not them, not exactly. The liars can suck it. I go back to her. Diablo. The woman who opened a room on CamALot and brought three masters of the universe to their knees with a voice and a look and the pure nerve to use them. Truth is, I miss her. I miss being her so much, it's a physical ache, and tonight, right now, I get to be her again, just for me, with nobody watching and nobody to lie to me in the morning.

And then, because I'm going all in, I reach into the bottom of the milk crate that passes for my nightstand and dig out the toy and the $20 gluten-free lube.

Beck had me buy this stuff, back when my life was a game I thought I was winning. Sent me a picture on my lunch hour like it was his dry cleaning, and I speed-walked to a purple-neon shop and bought it and the lube, and told myself that following his orders was somehow still me being the one in charge.

Fucker’s not watching now. Nobody is. And this stuff is mine. I'm the one who paid for it, so tonight, it’s not boss-mandated anything. Tonight, it's just me and the souvenirs I kept from the best and worst time of my life, and I am going to use it exactly how I want, at exactly the pace I want, for the benefit of nobody but me.

I think about Beck begging. I think about the sound Elias made once, the one he'd have died before letting anybody hear. I think about Theo's voice going ragged, there you go, that's it. I remember them watching me and stroking themselves until they exploded, their desire for me partially quenched by their orgasm but also unfulfilled because the closest they could get to me was through my webcam. That’s back before I knew what was really going on, back when I held every card or at least thought I did.

I take my time. That's the whole luxury of doing this for nobody but myself. There’s no camera to angle toward, no dashboard to watch, no show to run. Just me, my toy, and however long I feel like taking.

So I start slow, barely there, dragging it up the inside of my own thigh the way Beck once ordered me to. I make myself wait for it. I got very good at making other people wait. Turns out, I'm just as good at it by myself. By the time I finally slide the toy between my legs where I've been aching for it, I'm already slick and my hips are lifting off the mattress to meet it on their own.

I work it slow and mean and certain, the exact way I used to run that room. I bring myself right to the edge and back off, rubbing my clit and sliding it inside then doing it again, and again, because it's mine and there's nobody rushing me toward a finish they paid for. And when I finally quit fighting it and come, I go over hard, arching up off a mattress with a fistful of bedsheet pressed to my mouth out of a habit I don't need anymore, alone in a rented studio, saying nobody's name.

Take that, motherfuckers.

And this leaves me with one plain fact, lying there after, wrung out and weirdly, defiantly, okay.

I was not the mark.

You do not get wet over a con that was run on you. You get wet remembering a con you ran yourself. Every night I slathered on that lipstick, I found the exact soft place in each of the three of them and I pressed on it, on purpose, because I liked what it did and because it paid my debt. I told myself it was survival and it was. But survival was never the whole of it. I was good at Diablo. I loved being good at it. Sure, I was a con artist who got out-conned, you could say a player who lost a hand, but the last thing I am is a victim who got robbed.

A victim is helpless. I was in that game up to my neck, with both hands, on purpose. I gambled, and I lost, but I played.

Nobody took my power. Nobody can. I can only give it away, and I am done handing it out.

Which clears my head enough that I can see the thing I actually wanted, way underneath the money and the power and the whole beautiful catastrophe.